Growing Pains, Part 1
'American' Part 2: Dad, you can skip this one | Chapter 8
You are about to read a chapter from ‘American’. This is a collection of personal essays and memories detailing my life’s sequence in spite of - and because of - my culture and circumstances. All chapter will be posted in chronological order.
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December 17, 2022
Across the room, my cousin is snoring. My aunt startles awake and clears her throat. The baby joins into the commotion, commentating on the night. Pressed to my side is my mom, the two of us sharing a twin bed. I suspect she is as relieved as I am to be sardined here, away from the isolation of our respective homes. Present company includes three more aunts, three uncles, another cousin and another baby, with a tsunami of relatives still to arrive tomorrow.
The obituary reads “survived by nine children, three step-children, eighteen grandchildren, five step-grandchildren, twenty-nine great grandchildren, and eight step-great grandchildren.” Our Appalachian Mountain giant has left a legacy in every American time zone. Tonight is family Christmas, tomorrow is calling hours. Happy holidays.
Summer 2021
My phone cracks against the wall and slides to the floor.
“Who’s Shawn?”
“My college roommate. You met her last month.”
“Get out of my house.”
It’s the Fourth of July. In about seven minutes, I’ll be twenty-three. I woke up in the yard. The intention was a birthday campout. The upstairs light was on, and I was alone in the grass.
Climbing the stairs, my stomach flipped. We fought once already today, as he fell asleep with a bottle of wine in his hand. I found him now with a phone in each hand. His screen reads “Who is…” with a list of what appears to be guys’ names following.
The list includes people I hadn’t talked to since before our first date.
December 19, 2022, 8:35 pm
Snow is suspended in the headlights ahead of me. “Once you accept that life is really just a breath - that’s what the Scripture says - it becomes easier.” There is only grey in every direction. Grey clouds, grey trees, grey slush beneath the tires. I can accept that life is a breath, but I am neither living nor breathing in this moment.
“I go through phases of accepting that,” I offer. This is not one of them.
Christian rock plays over a static radio between cities, between frequencies. You must really need affirmations to listen to this stuff all day. But I feel cruel for thinking that. Dad has listened to Christian rock all day most days since I have been alive, and I know why he needs the affirmations.
My parents have always told me to beware of media that tells me what to believe and what to think. Yet here is K-Love, telling me for the ten millionth time, in not all that many creative variations, that everything will be fixed when you leave it to God.
I don’t disagree, but being told so by unimaginative radio tunes makes me question it out of spite. Being told so by my family feels like a dismissal of my right to emotion.
The bus back to Manhattan doesn’t arrive for another forty-five minutes, so I tell Dad to go to Wegmans, unable to admit that I just want to walk around with him for a while. I search for something to buy, find nothing of interest, and confess my ulterior motives. But Dad wanders several aisles away, and I feel no less alone than I have for the past month.
I hate parking lots. I hate grocery stores with too much space, the aisles spread out like an endless American purgatory. I hate grocery stores that sell clothes. I hate cars. I hate places that are not New York City, and that is a part of myself that disappoints me deeply.
Back on the road, our conversation is absent or belabored, and I choose the latter. It’s hard to talk to my dad about normal things. His stoicism is unnerving, and it betrays the part of himself that he passed on to me - the stark physics of an exponential inquisition of thought. We both have a remarkable ability to harpoon our own happiness with questions that were never meant to be asked.
We sit in the car outside the bus station, and I turn the Christian rock down and make some remark about it being high time that we allow ourselves to be happy, hoping to evoke an agreement. He prays instead, which is neither surprising nor disappointing.
9:40 pm
The bus is twenty minutes late. Dad is pacing the station, as though his steps will manifest some solution. This is his way of trying to help me, I know. He walks up to the departure door then across the station to the parking lot, keeping an eye out for my bus (and the parking police).
Tears are rolling down my cheeks. He is aware. He paces with greater ferocity.
My throat is choking my words. Can’t you stand still? Help me. But how? I don’t say anything to him, because I don’t know what he could do that would fix my crying.
The bus finally pulls in. Dad wanders back to me and hugs me. There are a million thoughts I need to say to him, to burst open this box of a relationship I’ve so carefully maintained my whole life. But I fear that when the box breaks, Dad will break with it. So again, my life as his daughter is a lie of omission, never wanting him to know how deeply broken I have found myself to be, and never wanting to be one more thing he has to fix.
We walk slowly to the departure door, and I hug him once again. I contemplate throwing myself at his feet, begging him to drive me back to Manhattan, as I wonder whether I can survive five hours on a bus full of strangers. The driver asks for my ticket, but instead I turn back to my dad and hug him once more, this weekend awakening me to how delicate life is, but feeling, most of all, like it is my own life that might cease at any moment.
10:40 pm
Mom always says we have guardian angels. I can always spot them; they’re not celestial or notable or even hot. In New York, they’re strangers that go out of their way to smile and say “Have a beautiful day,” right when I’m about to throw my belongings off the roof, dig myself a hole, and go off-grid, never to return.
Tonight, my guardian angel is an electrical engineer sitting next to me on the Greyhound. His name is Het, and he’s visiting from Canada. He likes vegetarian food and playing guitar, and we talk about books and family and his home country across the world. He has no idea that by talking to me, he saved himself from spending five hours next to a strange girl wailing and blowing her snot into an over-saturated tissue. He has no idea that he’s a savior.
November 25, 2022
Ro and I are talking over the kitchen counter, as calm as two turtles on a rock in the sunshine. We take careful turns speaking, and I turn over the list of my belongings in my head.
“Maybe we could step back, start getting to know each other slowly. Meet up in coffee shops, go about it the right way.”
He concedes that he was thinking the same thing, but is quick to dismiss the idea.
This all seemed inevitable last night. But now, in the clarity of morning, with coffee and sleep and no reason to hold back any truths, we’re conversing too candidly for me to accept that I questioned the gentlest man I have ever known out of my life. The sun streaks his face, and I want to place my hand on his cheek and laugh at how silly we’ve been.
He helps me pack my belongings, and we look at our brief four months together in retrospect, each problem we encountered feeling so little, so fixable now.
“So, are we still…together?”
“I don’t think we can uncross that bridge as quickly as we crossed it.”
We bring everything down to the car, and drive in silence punctuated by quiet sobs and small witticisms. As we exit into Harlem, Ro says, “I’m probably just being stupid.”
“Only time will tell.”
“That was a very kind response.” We hold hands, then quickly pull them away, as though touch alone is enough to force our logic to cede to the well of emotions that we never allow to surface.